Tools

Putting Pattern Analytics Into Programming

Perforce Software has announced Insights, an analytics solution designed to reveal valuable information on code and software development inside projects.

Built into Perforce products, Insights reveals information that isn't available in bug tracking or traditional work planning tools. The product enables development teams to measure their performance so they can tune and optimize their delivery pipelines.

Insights gathers metrics and presents them in ways that are meaningful to developers, team leads, and QA and release managers. For example, while a burn-down chart might show user stories only as closed, Insights assesses and displays the cost of code stability related to the closure.

NOTE: Insights is ready to consume data from other tools and/or publish it to third-party reporting tools through standard integration mechanisms — the browser-based user interface is customizable to individual customer needs.

What Developer Does What?

Insights works to provide an overview across a series of projects, deep-dive views of single projects, and "hot spot" reports such as most edited files or top contributors across the repository. A standalone server dashboard provides performance metrics for systems administrators monitoring the overarching Perforce versioning service.

"We worked side by side with our customers to design a tool that reveals the data they need to truly understand their development processes and release cycles," said Mark Warren, marketing director at Perforce.

Perforce insists that Insights Stability Index is a "pragmatic measure" of the stability of code in a project, analyzing the Raise and Fix rates for bugs, the amount of code that is changing in a project, and the amount of code that changes repeatedly. Tracking the index trend across a project's lifetime shows if stability goals will be met prior to release or if there is an unexpected destabilization in projects where stability is a priority.

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